Monday, June 28, 2010

My poor youngest son, who is still a baby and is 9 months old, has gotten his first ear infection. The poor thing has been uncomfortable for day and I dismissed it as teething. To my defense, he has not run a fever. But now I'm wondering just how many days he's actually had this wicked pain in his ear.

GRRR.

But it got me thinking...(I know, imagine that? LOL)

And I started to think about all the things most of us leave out of our writing. In my Westervelt Wolves series, for example, the couple from the first book have had lots of children at this point since the series has plowed forward, time wise. We don't ever discuss the day-to-day bits about taking care of children in our Romance novels. Never has Tristan had to change a diaper, at least not in the book.

This is, I've decided, a really good thing. In the fiction I read, I want romance, emotion, strings that tug my heart, even tears--but not the elements of real life that make me want to go 'blah' when I have to do them on a day to day basis.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The longer I am a mother, and for me that will be five years at the beginning of August, the more I discover that I really, really am not a calm person. If you had asked me before i had kids if I thought I was calm, I probably would have said 'about most things.' But since the birth of my Dear Son #1, I find that there is very little that doesn't make me want to go AHHHHH.

Just recently, my almost five year old son came home from a walk outside with his 2 year old brother and his 9 month old brother. As the older two were upstairs being put down for naps, DS goes into the living room, removes the safety cover from the plug, and sticks the metal end of the dog leash into the hole. The leash was burned, he was scared, and it was everything in my power not to literally go AHHHHHH.

Instead, I dug deep and discussed with him, as calmly as i was able, about the reason why that was a very, very, very bad idea. I think I might have scared him a little bit with my description about what could happen to him if he were to be hurt by electricity. It is possible, I suppose, that he will never, ever plug anything in again--even as an adult.

This quality of mine--the one that makes me want to go AHHHH all the time--presents itself in my writing. Sometimes I just want my characters to go AHHHHH. And then I have to remind myself that they need to use dialogue, and descriptive language. Just because AHHHH is a perfectly acceptable response in my little brain does not mean the rest of the world will follow what I'm thinking.

I think its a good thing that my job requires me to sit behind a computer and not fly an airplane or run a submarine.

Oh by the way, when I told my Husband what his son had done...his response "Oh I did stuff like that all the time when I was a kid."

Great. I think there are going to be lots of AHHHH moments for me in the future.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

I will admit. I am a series addict. I prefer to read them, I prefer to write them. I just don't like saying goodbye to my characters. I like to see them again on the outskirts of other books. I like story-lines to continue.

So clearly I have several that I'm writing.

The first is the Westervelt Wolves. Here is a picture of Her Wolf, it is the first book in the series and published by Liquid Silver Books.

Her Wolf, while it was the first book I sold was not the first book I wrote. The first one I wrote was a book called Love Beyond Time, which is the first book in a series about the Outsiders published by Eirelander Publishing.

When I sat down to write Love Beyond Time, I always knew that it would be a series. The problem? It didn't sell until it had been reworked and even then I held it on my hard drive for a very long time without trying to sell it. This proved to be a problem when I needed to write Love Beyond Sanity, the second book in the series. It had been nearly a year since I'd lived in that world. It took forever to write. I cried, I had a hard time, and ultimately I LOVED the book when it was finished. It is being published August 6th, 2010 with Eirelander Publishing.

When the time came to work on the next installment, which is my current Work In Progress (see Right hand bar on this blog for an updated list of what I'm working on at all times...), it was so much easier. It had only been a few months since I'd last spent time with the Outsiders.

I also have other series I'm working on but I can't talk about them right now except to say one is about Superheroes (Screw Superman is coming August 2nd, 2010 with Noble Romance Publishing) and one is about something else entirely which I'm not yet ready to talk about because I haven't tried to sell it anywhere yet.

Friday, June 25, 2010

I think every Friday I'm going to ask you to tell me your Paranormal/Fantasy-esque stories. In other words, something freaky that happened to YOU.

Shall I start by telling you about something freaky that happened to me?

When I was young, I went to sleep away camp in New Hampshire. It was a beautiful, hippy-like camp without a lot of the amenities you see at a lot of the camps. In fact, later on I would go to a more hotel like camp but that year I was all about roughing it.

We were coming out of our cabin one morning. And by 'we' I mean me and three other girls. It was raining and we put on our raincoats, which were hung up outside the cabin, under an awning.

Suddenly, a bright light filled the air around us. We all took a step back, almost simultaneously pinned against the outside door of the cabin. And as we stood there watching, the light travelled towards us eventually coming to our cabin. Seconds later I heard the largest boom I've ever heard in my life.

The cabin across from us had been struck by lightening. The electricity travelled from the top of that cabin on a electrical line to our cabin. That was the light and the boom. What was scarier?

That same summer, my house where I grew up was struck while I wasn't in it. Just last week the house across from me here now was struck. There have been many instances in my life of electricity striking somewhere near to where I am.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

I check my Goodreads ratings. I know I shouldn't. My husband begs me not to but there I am, a lot, reading what people say about my work. It doesn't seem to matter how many 5 and 4 stars I get on a book, even one person rating one of works below a 3 star is enough to make me momentarily doubt everything I'm doing.

And then I shake it off and keep going. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and I don't like everything I read, even things other people love. That's the thing about reading. It really is a subjective activity.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Become a follower of my blog today either by clicking the 'Follow' button to the right or using Networked blog on Facebook and I will give one of my lucky Followers (and this includes those who have already followed!) a Love Beyond Time t-shirt (Size XL because that's what I have left. LOL)

Monday, June 21, 2010

I think there are members of my family that think I'm really anti-social. In fact, I imagine they are sure I am.

Today we took the kids to a bar mitzvah. A lot of my family was there and we were seated all together at a table. Nicely, because they love me, they asked me a lot about my writing.

I had a hard time answering them.

Example:

Family Member: Hey Rebecca, how is the writing going?

Me: Fine.

Family Member: What are you working on?

Me: The third book in a series I've been working on

Family Member: Oh your wolf books?

Me: No, another series

Family Member: What is that series about?

This is where it becomes complicated. This is the third book in this series. It's about a lot of stuff. It's about love versus violence, its about fate, its about becoming the people we're supposed to be. It might be useful, at this point, if I said something like 'It's really hard to describe." But I'm not built that way so I say something like this:

Me: It's about these mythical people I invented called the Outsiders. They're fighting a battle of good versus evil.

Family Member: Are they aliens?

Me: No.

Silence.

The truth is, it's very hard for me to talk about my writing when I'm not writing it or to talk about it with people who a. haven't read it or b. aren't also in the same business. So I think that rather than have the above conversation over and over again, I tend to make my conversations more like this:

Family Member: How is the writing?

Me: Oh Fine.

And then I try to change the subject because the answer 'it's complicated' tends to lead to silence and I don't want to be come off as antisocial.

How about all of you? Do you talk about your writing with your family?

Sunday, June 20, 2010

I don't know if any of the Dads in my life are going to read this but I thought that I would take today off from talking about writing to praise all of the Dads in my life: My Father, my Pop-Pop, my Father-in-Law, and my Husband.

Let's start with my Dad.

My Dad is a really amazing guy. He took care of all of us when I was growing up. He's smart, caring, and he knows how to get to the heart of a problem to fix it. He's a man of action and a planner. Like me, he's task oriented. When I had to take my oldest son, who was then only 3 years old to have his tonsils out, I was a bit of a mess.

They would only let one of us go back with him to be with him when they put him to sleep and we decided, without much fuss, that my husband would be the best person to do that. He handles crisis situations very well and somehow the idea of watching them put my son under general anesthesia was more than I thought I could handle. I had visions of hitting the floor in a faint while my son screamed.

Anyway, my dear husband took him back and I sat in the waiting room with my father, tears forming in my eyes. We hadn't expected Dad to come that day. That sort of thing seemed to be more in Mom's realm of expertise. But she'd woken up that morning not feeling well and so she'd sent Dad to be with us. It turned out to be such a blessing that she did. If my Mom had been with me at that moment, we would have both started sobbing in our chairs.

Instead, Dad looked at me, gave my shoulders a squeeze and reminded me in that moment that I was making my son's life better. That we had made the decision to have the surgery with a lot of thought, that my 3 year old had been on antibiotic almost every month for a year and that he wasn't sleeping well. He reminded me that it was all but astounding that we have the medical ability to fix his issues with a forty-five minute operation.

His reality check, delivered in a kind way, was exactly the medicine I needed at that moment. I stopped crying. He was right. This was hard but it was the right thing to do. It was why we had decided to do it. In that second, I found my strength instead of wallowing in my temporary weakness.

It was no surprise that when my husband broke his hand and had to have surgery, Mom sent Dad to the hospital with me to wait. We ate breakfast and talked about buttered rolls. Before I knew it, the surgery was over.

I love you Dad! Happy Father's Day!

My Pop-Pop is 85 years old. He flew up this week to attend a family event and he looks fantastic. He was a constant presence in my life when I was growing up. I'm so blessed to still have him with us. This year he has both his son's with his for Father's Day. I danced with him at my wedding.

Happy Father's Day Popop! Love you!

My Father-in-Law has the best sense of humor of anyone I know. He's an animal lover, he's kind and considerate, and most importantly his attention to his children growing up, helped to make my husband the man he is today. He flew airplanes, pilots boats, and raises and breeds Border Collies. He's been all over the world but I think he would say that he'll never leave the Gulf Coast, it's his home and he rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina. Really, I couldn't ask for better family than the one I married into.

Happy Father's Day Daddy-in-Law. We all love you!

What is there really to say about my husband? When I married him I knew he would be a good father but I don't think I could possibly have understood just what a spectacular father he turned out to be. His family is everything to him. He's hugely involved with his boys, even if it means just rolling around on the ground with the boys or hitting a ball in the backyard. Truth is, he's everything to us.

We love you honey. Happy Father's Day!!

It's funny because in my writing--a-ha, you say, she is fitting in some writing here--I have so far created three really bad father figures. It's not from real life. In real life, I have the best of all possible worlds.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Arguably, for some people, it's the most important scene(s) in the book. Truthfully, they used to make me blush.

I can remember when I first started to write them. I would get red faced. It would take me a week or more to write them. My critique partner would laugh. 'They're just words,' she told me. Of course she was right but it didn't get to the crux of what my issue was.

Here's the deal--the reason it took me a very long time to make my own personal blog is because, ready for this?, in real life...I am shy.

That's right. Although I may come across online like I'm confident and easy going, the truth is that I'm not. You should see me in my REAL LIFE (RL on Twitter, right?) I second guess every decision I make. Should I get dressed in black or white? Should I send the kids to camp or not? I bite my nails, stay up late worrying, and I never, ever, ever speak in public. I'm shy and worrisome and even though in most of my writing I am not this way at all, when it came to the love scenes I was bringing all kinds of real life worry into the scenes.

Then something sort of spectacular happened. I had written a lot of love scenes, including a full fledged erotica called Behind the Scenes for Eirelander Publishing and I was still biting my nails over the scenes every time they would show up in the books. I loved how they turned out but still..

One day my husband was sitting in his office and a friend of the family who is also a work colleague of his came in. They chatted for a while and she mentioned that she had read one of my books. I think it was Love Beyond Time. He asked her how she enjoyed it and her response to him was: "She used the word cock."

That was all she could say about it. I guess it had really offended/___fill in your verb here. This kind of surprised me because most people who have read Love Beyond Time, the first book I ever wrote, have loved it.

Anyhow, instead of being horrified I cracked up laughing because the thing I had worried the most about had happened. Someone in my RL..the place where I worry and I'm shy...had read the book, made a morality call about its language and I had not perished where I stood of humiliation.

Ever since then I've had no problems writing them. None. In fact, I have fun.

How about any of you out there? Ever had trouble getting through your first love scenes, either written or read?

Friday, June 18, 2010

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with it but I can tell you what I'm not going to do with it. I'm not going to blog on Tuesdays. Want to know why? Because every Tuesday I blog here: Paranormal Romantics. I don't think I'm going to keep any set schedule either for a while.

Some days I might blog twice a day and then go three or four days without blogging at all. At least while I'm figuring out whether or not I like doing this at all.